


The Heisenburg Picture

by Sapphy, SapphyWatchesYouSleep (Sapphy)



Series: Uncomfortable Conversations [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Drabble, Embarrassed!Watson, I know nothing of mathematics, Multi, Possibly unfinnished
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-26
Updated: 2012-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-30 04:30:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/327739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphy/pseuds/Sapphy, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sapphy/pseuds/SapphyWatchesYouSleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John had been hoping too sleep on the train, or maybe even read. He'd forgotten to allow for the Holmes family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Heisenburg Picture

**Author's Note:**

> This feels unfinished too me, but I didn't know what else to do with it, so I posted it. Any suggestions welcome.
> 
> Credit to Moffat, ACD and Mark Gattis (cue dreamy sighs)

John fell into his seat, relieved to have caught the train. The traffic had been dreadful and his taxi driver had been nearly apoplectic by the time he’d pulled up at Paddington, three minutes before the train was due to leave.

He liked trains. True, one didn’t have to do anything in a taxi, but one was still so close to the noise and stress of the London traffic, the swearing drivers and terrified cyclists. On a train, one simply sat in reasonably peaceful surroundings and looked out at the countryside rushing past.

A movement inside the carriage caught his eye, and he turned his attention from watching the people on the platform in time to see a tall slender woman with steel grey hair trying its best to escape from its bun take the seat opposite him. Her fingers, he noticed, were stained with blue ink. She wore tweeds and a scarf which to John’s inexperienced eye looked expensive. She gave him a bright beaming smile which didn’t quite disguise the steely intelligence in her eyes.

“Yes dear, very expensive. A gift, of course – there really isn’t much money in mathematics. I was quite sure for a moment there I was going to miss the train,” she said in a pleasant voice. “Fortunately, dear Mycroft arranged for signal failures at Solihull. Of course, I don’t know that it was Mycroft, but when one’s known the dear boy as long as I have, one starts to get a feeling that there is no chance or luck, just Mycroft. And he did know how important it was to me to speak with you. Not that I couldn’t have done it elsewhere, but I do so think that it’s important to have a neutral space, when one’s discussing things like this. I did think of inviting you to the house, but I didn’t think you’d like it. There’s only me there now, and the house-keeper but she’s given up trying to tidy my things, because they only get messy again, and sometimes I write my equations on the walls and I didn’t think a military man would like that sort of thing. And I could have come up to see you in London, but I really don’t like London much, and anyway it all feels like Sherlock’s territory, except for the bits which Mycroft owns.”

John stared at the woman in front of him. He had followed her disconnected conversation reasonably well, but then he’d had practise dealing with trauma victims, who could rarely keep up a logical stream of thought. He could only think that the wildly eccentric person now sitting opposite him was Sherlock and Mycroft’s ‘Mummy’.

“Quite right, my dear, but do please call me Leticia. Now, I believe you are having sex with my boys.”

He stared at her, shocked by the bluntness of her pronouncement. Even her sons would have put in more tactfully than that.

“Not really polite, just blurting it out like that,” she said cheerfully, “but really, how else is one supposed to say it? And I don’t mind dear, really I don’t. I just wanted to meet you, and talk to you about some things, and I really thought you’d feel more comfortable if you knew right away what I was here about.” She paused, peering out of the window which still looked out on the platform, thanks to Mycroft and his signal failures. “The angles in those pillars are really quite fascinating,” she said dreamily. “Quite a pleasant light blue really, which is unusual because the Victorians did so like public buildings to be full of red angles, and really there’s nothing wrong with red, I understand it’s really a very strong colour for angles, which is of course why all those nasty Victorian building are still standing, but so much red all at once gives me a headache. That blue is really much more restful.”

Jon just nodded. He hadn’t understood a word she’d said, but he’d understood what it meant. Kinesthesia.

She smiled at him. “Something like that dear, yes. Psychiatrists and doctors have been trying for years to explain the Holmes but really I’ve never understood why they felt the need. We don’t go around analysing you normals after all.”

He stared slightly, taken aback by her apparent mind-reading. Even life with Sherlock and Mycroft hadn’t prepared him for this.

“They’ve taught themselves not to do it, dear. Because they have to deal with people, and it upsets them and then they won’t do what the boys want them to do. At least not right away. People generally do what Mycroft wants in the end, but sometimes he has to encourage them, and that’s rather tedious. But I don’t really see people, not since I retired from the University. Only the housekeeper and she’s not one for talking and the boys who quite understand. You don’t mind do you? I can stop if it bothers you, but it’s so dull to hold a conversation at someone else’s pace.”

John chivalrously said that of course he didn’t mind. It seemed the only thing to do.

She smiled again. It was odd to see a smile of apparently real affection on the face of a Holmes. The boys both smiled when they were pleased with how thing were going, but it was rare indeed that their smiles be directed onto another person.

“Aren’t you lovely?” she cooed. “There aren’t many who are so accepting. Easy to see why the boys like you so much!”

“Why one of them likes me,” John muttered rebelliously, then coloured when he realised that he’d spoken the thought out loud. Not that thinking it silently would have prevented Mummy Holmes from hearing it.

“Oh don’t be silly, my dove. Mycroft adores you! I’ve never known him so besotted with anyone before.”

Besotted wasn’t the word John wouldn’t have chosen. Mycroft barely spoke to him and they had next to no interaction outside the bedroom.

“He took you on a date didn’t he?” she asked, gently smiling.

John couldn’t help but smile when he remembered the utter disaster that had been their only attempt at a date. They’d intended to go for a quiet stroll around Hyde Park. They’d got as far as a stall selling ice-cream on the edge of the park. Mycroft had bought John an ice-cream, and John had had the chance to take all of one lick, before Mycroft had been so overcome by lust that he’d dragged him back to his car and had just begun to do unmentionable things to John’s utterly unresisting body, some of them involving the ice-cream, when his blackberry had gone off, announcing the incursion of South Korean ships into contested waters. He’d delayed preventing Wold War III long enough to deposit John outside the nearest tube station with ice cream on his neck and his shirt buttoned wrong. They hadn’t attempted a second date.

“The point, my dove, is that he tried. I am reasonably sure it was his first attempt. And I have never known anyone hold his attention for more than a week unless their pervertions are really astonishing. And yet you have been an item for several months. Even such an unusual person as yourself can’t have enough peculiarities to have kept him amused for this long. The only conclusion one can draw is that his interest in you is beyond merely sexual, even if he doesn’t know how to express it.”

John felt a little shell-shocked. She sounded so certain, and he couldn’t fault her logic, and it left him reeling. That he meant more to Mycroft than simply a pleasingly available sexual partner was something that had simply never occurred to him. He wonders now why not.

Mummy Holmes (he can’t seem to think of her as anything else – Leticia doesn’t suit her and Mrs Holmes sounds to formal) smiles gently at him, waiting patiently for him to finish his emotional crisis, tracking the passage of his skittish thoughts by minute changes in his posture and expression.  
“But he’s never seemed jealous…” John mutters, aware this time that he’s voicing his thoughts, but accepting that whatever happens, Mummy Holmes will hear them.

“I try to avoid knowing too much about Mycroft’s private life,” she told him, “but I have good reason to suppose he’s used to sharing his lovers if it’s required. Or if he fancies it. Sharing you with Sherlock just means he knows he can trust the other person in the relationship. I imagine Sherlock made a great deal of fuss to begin with? He always was the melodramatic one.”

“He wasn’t very pleased about it,” John admits, remembering with a fondness borne of distance the temper tantrums Sherlock threw in the beginning. “He’s getting over it now, especially since…” he trailed off, suddenly acutely aware of who he was talking to.

She just turned her ever present smile on him and said cheerfully, “So Sherlock’s finally realised just why he’s so obsessed with Mycroft has he? It was only a matter of time I suppose. Just you make sure they don’t get arrested won’t you my sweet?”

That wasn’t the reaction he expected from a mother on being told her youngest son had recently realised he was madly in lust with the elder, even if he didn’t indulge in actual sex. But then, she was a Holmes. It was entirely possible that she’d seen this coming years ago and realised herself incapable of preventing it.

“Half right dear. I’ll admit I did see it coming a while ago, but really, once they were of age, I never felt my boy’s sexual escapades where any of my business, unless they were hurting someone.” She searched his face with anxious eyes. “Sherlock isn’t doing anything to hurt you is he? I did spend a long time trying to get him to understand the basic human moral codes but he never really got it, and I must admit it never occurred to me that he might one day have a relationship. But he will stop when you say stop. I spent a long time on that one and I am sure he won’t have forgotten. Mycroft on the other hand… but then he’s better at not upsetting people in the first place so perhaps it doesn’t matter that he refuses to see himself as being bound by any moral code.”

John thought it over. Mycroft could be so cold and distant with him sometimes that John just wanted to curl up and cry, and for all that he never doubted Sherlock’s devotion to him, he spent as much time hurt and angry as he did feeling loved and cherished. But beneath it all he knew, really knew with a certainty that surprised him, that they never meant to hurt him. That neither of them _would_ ever mean to hurt him, whatever happened.

“No,” he said quietly, as much to himself as to Mummy, “He’s not hurting me.”

The train jerked slightly as it finally began to move and Mummy Holmes produced wool and knitting needles and the most complex piece of knitting John had ever seen. Seeing him looking she smiled brightly. “It’s a map of the Heisenburg picture,” she explained. “The red represents the vector and the blue represents variable A. I was thinking of using it as a pot holder when I’m finished with it.”

Much as he loved them (two of them at least and he thinks he could quickly become very fond of Mummy) John reflected that eccentric really wasn’t a strong enough word to describe the Holmes’. But stark staring bonkers wasn’t very polite.


End file.
